Never achieving recognition in his lifetime, Georges Michel found employment as a restorer of Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Louvre Museum. He drew inspiration from the moody landscapes of the seventeenth-century masters, whose work he knew so well. Following their example, Michel chose scenes familiar to him, in this instance the countryside outside Paris. The dominance of the storm-swept sky over the panorama of cultivated land, another hallmark of earlier Dutch painting, lends brooding grandeur to an otherwise ordinary view. Michel was eventually to be hailed as the precursor of the Barbizon school of landscape painting.

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